Team adds spring to New Tampa's step

TAMPA -- Six years after Wharton High School was carved from wetlands and mangroves, New Tampa's white-collar suburbanites have found a place to rally, a reason to cheer.

Thanks to a fairy tale football season, Tampa's vanilla community now tastes a little more like mint chocolate chip. For this moment, it has a swagger, like a pit bull among poodles.

The change took time.

Wharton's football team was slaughtered, 57-0, in its first game in 1997. Things didn't get much better until this year, when the team's 31 seniors compiled a surprising 12-1 record, bringing a state semifinal game to Wharton on Friday night.

A few dozen regulars in the bleachers have turned into a standing-room-only multitude, packing the house on a 45-degree night.

"Even beyond football, this enhances the sense of community," said Dan Crowder, a former Wharton High English teacher. "It encompasses people. This is and will continue to be a defining year."

It took only a glance Friday to see what he meant.

You could smell it in the $1 Cajun peanuts, the hot dogs warmed on the charcoal grill, the hot chocolate selling by the gallon. You could see it in faces painted blue and white, mothers wearing Wildcat jerseys, posters with glitter.

You could hear it in the tailgating parties in the parking lot, the screams of the cheerleaders, in the stomping of feet on the cold aluminum bleachers that sounded like a thousand hammers in unison.

You could feel it in Paul Wharton, the school's 88-year-old namesake, who shuffled into the weight room in his gray tweed suit for a pregame pep talk. The old man told the young ones how impressed he was with them, how proud he was of them.

"It isn't most exciting thing to have an 88-year-old man talk to them," he said. "But for anybody who has worked as hard as they have, it's the least I could do."

In the grocery stores, at the YMCA, the team's push toward the championship was the talk of this sprawling suburban community.

"They're a great football team and it's great that this is so quick after them not winning," said city Councilman Shawn Harrison, a Tampa Palms homeowner. "They're the first high school in New Tampa (and) we're building a tradition."

There's more of everything now at Wharton on football Fridays.

More gray-haired ladies wrapped in shawls, more baby strollers, more television cameras, more Afro wigs and bullhorns, more young lovers bundled together under quilts, their warm breath spilling out into the cold night.

High school football is not -- and probably never will be -- entrenched in New Tampa the way it is in towns that dot the landscapes of Texas and Oklahoma and Alabama.

There, the world halts on game day. Sixteen year-old fullbacks are treated as legends.

New Tampa will always have health clubs that serve vitamin shakes, chain restaurants and movieplexes, BMWs parked in front of large stucco houses with landscaped yards.

All of which makes it more remarkable that one successful season can have mothers painting wildcat whiskers on their faces and grown men leaving work early to tailgate.

Even on Friday, while Wharton trounced Daytona Beach Mainland 30-3 and earned a shot at the state title next week, life in New Tampa marched on.

Cars filled the parking lot at the local Wal-Mart. The Publix down the street was busy. So was the Muvico theater and the Chili's restaurant down the road, and dozens of other places.

But in this corner of New Tampa, something had changed.

Where before only mangroves and strip malls and suburbia stood, now there was something more, something that no one talked about but everyone shared.

They cheered here Friday night -- finally -- and shattered the peace of the swamp.

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